Since we started planning this journey, Cape Town was one of the places we very much wanted to go. But by the time the trip started back in January, visiting Cape Town was looking fairly dicey. They were in the middle of an epic two-year-plus drought, water restrictions were in place, and there was talk of the city completely running out of water by April.

Fortunately, enough rains had come and pushed that zero-day date out to 2019 at least, and Cape Town insisted they were open for tourists. So after a relaxing week following our camping trip in Namibia, we took the short flight down to Cape Town to spend a week in the Mother City.

Riding into the city from the airport, the beauty of the area stuns. Green, rolling hills, leading to the towering landscape features that Cape Town is known for: lion’s head mountain, signal hill, and the iconic table mountain. Nestled in between them all is the city of Cape Town.

Our uber took us downtown, down the rowdy central area of Long Street, to our AirBnb for the week. Erika and I talked about the ride into town, and realized we both had the same initial feeling: this felt like a city we could easily fall in love with.

Touring by Walking

For our first morning in Cape Town, we started touring in our traditional way: with free walking tours. We did two that day, which turned out also to be a good way to spend the day because, apparently, Cape Town is extremely sleepy on Sundays.

Our first tour went through the city center, highlighting random sites of the city. Here are some palaces from the Dutch East India Company days. Here is an arch dedicated to Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu. This tour was fine, just not very deep-diving. That more shallow, surface level view of the city was disappointing for us, coming off a number of very good, very complex tours in South America.

The second tour was much better. We took a tour through the neighborhood of Bo-Kaap, a heavily Muslim area of Cape Town. The neighborhood is dotted with minarets, and filled with brightly colored houses. Our tour guide, Matthew, was great, energetic and knowledgeable. He also suggested we try a Cape Town dish–Bobotie–that came about from the mix of Malay and other Asian influences that made their way to the city.

[We finally took up this recommendation at, of all places, the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. Spoiler alert: it was excellent!]

Touring by Bus

Touristic buses really aren’t our thing. But in South Africa, it turns out it would be! We decided to spend the next day on the hop-on-hop-off tourist bus, and see some of the more far-flung areas of Cape Town easily.

The weather in the morning was excellent, and we had a lovely time sitting in the open air portion of the bus, winding our way through town. The bus route leaves the main area of town, climbs to the base of Table Mountain, and then heads down the hills to the expensive, upper class beach area of Camps Bay. We decided to jump out here, check out the scenery, put our feet in the ocean, and get some lunch.

From there, the bus winds along the cliffs of the shore, through more glitzy, expensive neighborhoods, filled with large condos clinging to the cliffs. It makes its way back into town, into what is apparently the number one tourist attraction in all of Africa: a mall! Basically a mall. It’s the redeveloped water front, which includes large malls, outdoor shopping, touristic boat rides, a ferris wheel, and at least one brewery, it turns out.

We went to that brewery, and that’s the last we need to say about it. Then, we decided to spend the afternoon taking the other hop-on-hop-off bus route. This second route goes much further outside the city, past some of the Apartheid-era Townships, before following the beach back into town.

To Table Mountain

One of the most famous things about Cape Town is the large national park situated in the middle of it: Table Mountain. It’s large, it’s tall, it’s beautiful. Its plant life is incredibly unique—there is an entire phylum to which Table Mountain plants belong. It’s really something special.

There are plenty of hiking opportunities there too, of course. There are numerous day hikes, multi-day hikes, even week-long treks. It’s crazy!

We of course wanted to do a hike there, so Erika found us a popular day hike that goes right up the gorge, to the top of the mountain. The weather was beautiful the previous day, and we woke up to a perfect morning the day of our hike. We decided to take an Uber to get us to the start of the hike—which is just past the station for the cable car that can take you to the top of the mountain.

The hike ascends rapidly and is incredibly beautiful. You don’t have to go far up before you’re rewarded with sweeping views of Cape Town below you, all the way to the sea and beyond. The plants are lush and beautiful, and though the hike is indeed quite popular, we were never crowded.

Unfortunately, the weather conspired against us as we got closer to the summit. A thick fog enveloped the mountain top, which obscured all our views when we reached it. It also made it drastically colder, and we quickly threw multiple layers of jackets on to combat the cold.

On top of the mountain, we hiked out a little over a mile to Maclear’s Beacon, hoping to give the fog time to dissipate. It was… well, it was a pile of rocks. So stunning! It also got bitterly cold during that portion of the walk. I don’t need to tell you I was pretty cranky on the way back.

We retraced our steps and returned to the visitor area at the summit, where the cable car comes in. There, there’s a cafe which we were excited to sit inside, warm up, and have some hot tea. Well, it wasn’t heated, the door would stick open, and it was just as cold inside as outside. Sigh. We at least had some tea, decided hiking back down wasn’t for us, and instead took the scenic, very quick cable car back down.

The fog really was just at the summit, so once we got back to the bottom, the weather was beautiful again. So, rather than call an Uber, we decided to just walk back to Cape Town. It wasn’t terribly far—just a few miles—and it was all downhill, so it was a pretty easy walk. It also went through some very nice neighborhoods, which were interesting to see.

Stellenbosch Wine Country

The much revered South African wine country is just a short ways outside of Cape Town. So the next day, we rented a car to go spend the night out in Stellenbosch and visit some wineries. We picked up our adorable, brand new, Volkswagen Polo from Europcar and we were on our way!

We settled in for our road trip and… within an hour we were there. Yeah, it’s just right outside Cape Town. We grabbed lunch to kill a little time, checked into our AirBnb, put our Polo in the garage and got ready for some wine!

None of the wineries were quite close enough to walk to, but a number of them are easily reached by an inexpensive Uber ride. We got some recommendations from the visitor center right next door to our apartment, and called a car to head to our first winery, Lanzerac.

Lanzerac is just a few miles outside Stellenbosch town, but the scenery quickly becomes spectacular. Towering, not-far-off mountains surround green rolling countryside. Meanwhile, the buildings on that side of town, and the estate of Lanzerac itself, give the feeling of old southern US cities—Charleston, maybe, or even something smaller.

The falling leaves of the trees at the winery, along with the crisp, cool air, gave the feeling of New England in the fall. We were enjoying this immensely, is what I’m saying really, and we hadn’t even had the wine yet.

The wine would be great, it turned out. Also, quite cheap. This was a wonderful turn of events from previous wine trips we’ve done! The tastings in South America weren’t bad cost-wise, certainly not when compared with California. But the tastings in South Africa were just extremely cheap.

We each ordered a tasting, which each came with five very healthy pours of wine. Erika was even a little more decadent with hers, and got the wine and chocolate pairing tasting. Each wine came with a purpose-picked piece of chocolate to pair with it.

These were pretty uniformly great, and, as I said, they were pretty healthy pours. We were thinking of visiting three wineries, but that was rapidly seeming like a bad idea! We decided to just go to one more, and called an Uber to head to our next stop, Neil Ellis winery.

Neil Ellis wasn’t as obviously beautiful driving up to it—the turn-in was a gravel driveway just on the side of a busy main road, and the building was certainly less charming. Inside, though, they had a beautiful tasting room, with windows offering gorgeous views of the surrounding valleys. We were also the only ones there, which was nice!

Along with our wine tastings, at Neil Ellis we ordered a charcuterie and cheese plate, which proved to be enormous and delicious. This is the life! This is why we quit our jobs!

Feeling much too good, we headed back to our apartment and, not surprisingly, passed out for a few hours. Day drinking just really isn’t good for us old folks anymore.

Boulder’s Beach… and Penguins!

The next morning, we checked out of our AirBnb in Stellenbosch and aimed our Polo south down the cape, with the goal of Boulder’s Beach. Boulder’s Beach is an area along the east-side of the cape where a large colony of African penguins have long nested and made a home.

The drive down that way is lovely, following the coastline, and passing through a number of adorable little towns. We stopped in one of these towns for lunch, had an excellent pizza, and continued our way to the penguins.

When you get to the Boulder’s Beach area, it’s not hard to figure out where you’re going. There are signs directing to the penguins, and when you park the car, the parking lot attendants tell you unprompted where to walk for the penguins. They know why we’re all here.

The walkways built up to usher the numerous tourists around the site are very nice, and give you beautiful views of the shoreline and the large, playful colony of penguins.

You can also get down closer to the shore, for some more up-close time with the critters:

We had to get the car back to Cape Town to return, so we bade our penguin friends farewell and headed north back to the city. The drive back was fantastic, as we accidentally took the Chapmans Peak Drive–a scenic toll-road that gives a beautiful, winding drive glued to the cliffs around Cape Town. I was in a car commercial!

Hug the turns. <Shifts into a higher gear> Feel the freedom of the open road. <Zoom!> The Volkswagen Polo…

“Ugh, babe, can you slow down?!” Erika wasn’t enjoying the commercial filming as much.

A Complicated Love

Our initial feeling was correct, and we did very much fall in love with Cape Town. We talked frequently during the week how easily we could see ourselves living there. But there is a significant darkness there that complicates that love, that can’t be overlooked.

There is tremendous wealth in Cape Town, but that wealth is far from shared by all. The homelessness and poverty in the city are unavoidable. Beggars are more aggressive than anywhere we’ve seen before, frequently following you a block or more down the street continuing to ask for help. It’s unnerving, but you get the impression it’s simply desperation that makes them so persistent.

And then there are the slums. The townships.

Just outside of Cape Town, huge villages are cobbled together, housing thousands upon thousands of South Africans in squalor. Some of them have electricity, some do not. Some only have shared, communal bathroom facilities. We passed a half dozen of these on our drive from Cape Town to Stellenbosch, and to see such poverty sandwiched between those two areas of wealth was striking.

It’s heartbreaking. Especially because it was all created by racism, and apartheid specifically. The institution of apartheid came down over 20 years ago, but the wounds it created, including this chasm of inequality, will take much longer to heal.

It’s impossible not to compare it to our own racist history in America. In the 1900s, we didn’t have quite the system of disenfranchisement that apartheid was—but it was close! Nevertheless, less codified systems of housing discrimination, and employment discrimination, created our own slums and ghettos, and our own chasm of inequality, similar to South Africa’s. And similar to South Africa, we still have a long way to go to rectify these past mistakes, and include and care for all our citizens.

What’s Next?

We’re off to the huge South African city of Johannesburg, for a single whirlwind day of touring before moving on to Zimbabwe. Thanks for stopping by the blog, we hope you enjoyed reading!